It was a demon.

It was an alien.

It was a zombie.

It was a mutant.

It was…awful.

Wil thought as Gutierrez continued to drive after O’Donnell.

Wil had never been religious. His parents had been atheist, and he’d never seen the appeal of organized faiths. Since he’d begun thinking about offing himself years ago, he’d been even less inclined to seek out some form of salvation or enlightenment. The concept of more life, of a never-ending existence, exhausted him.

It was oblivion he had wanted: the quiet, empty dark that waited with infinite patience for all things, from ants, to men, to the stars themselves. Wil had thought of it in the same way he thought of sleep: warm, comfortable, restful. It would have been a gentle shushing of his harried mind, a final silence to all the quiet desperation.

The things that had been in the ranger HQ had shattered those childish notions.

The darkness in their eyes was both lifeless and brimming with malice and fury that was terrifying in its vitality.

They had all been dead.

Sandoval, Mr. Stewart, Mrs. Stewart, little daughter Stewart, and Birkin. All very dead.

Yet they had moved, lunged and grasped with purpose. The oblivion those things promised was not eternal slumber, but a nightmare of thorns and teeth and writhing worms.

“Christ, Sandoval,” Gutierrez whispered and broke into Wil’s thoughts.

“Huh?” he said. He’d been playing the memory of the Sandoval-thing breaking through the door and killing Birkin and the family over and over. He tried to skip over the parts where it stared directly at him, and especially when it fell on the daughter with its teeth, but those parts were the sharpest in their clarity.

“He was the boss when I started here four years ago. Bit of a hard-ass, but y’know, nice,” Gutierrez said. Her voice was flat, as though reading from a cue card just beyond the windshield. Her face was slack too, and she didn’t blink.

“Had a wife and three kids. Always helped out the rookies. We butted heads sometimes but…good guy. I didn’t…I mean, you saw that, right? That was real? Sandoval was…wrong?” Gutierrez asked and her face finally twisted into an expression. Not a pleasant one: somewhere between confusion and despair.

“Yeah. I saw it,” Wil said. He thought of the numerous black eyes splitting through Sandoval’s swollen scalp and blinking their newly formed, bloody lids. He shuddered. “It was real.”

“Birkin’s dead,” Gutierrez said.

“Yeah.”

“And that family. The little girl too.”

“Dead.”

“But they chased us. After they were dead.”

“Yeah.”

“Holy shit,” Gutierrez said and her whole body trembled as she let out a breath. They drove in silence for several moments before she swallowed and asked, “Zombies?”

“I was thinking that. The girl, the mom, and Birkin were all like the deer. Big muscles, fast, aggressive. Mr. Stewart was so slow, though. Just shuffling around, awkward, like he was asleep or drunk. They were kinda like zombies. Sandoval though…not what I’d call a zombie.”

“Hell. Can’t believe I’m talking about this shit,” Gutierrez said. “Zombies. Fucking zombies.”

Wil saw the passenger window roll down and an arm extend from inside. Matsuda waved at them, then pointed to the side of the road as the jeep’s right blinker turned on and the vehicle began to slow.

“Looks like they wanna talk too,” Wil said. Gutierrez grunted and pulled in behind O’Donnell’s jeep. They were on the western side of the lake, still following the main road around its perimeter. O’Donnell had stopped by a small lookout point and picnic area that had a number of wooden tables and benches covered in flaking green paint. It reminded Wil of peeling, fungal skin. A wide wooden sign covered in a thick pane of clear plastic stood at the edge of the picnic area, displaying a map of the lake and the forest around it. Several helpful stickers had been stuck to like, like a cheerful yellow “YOU ARE HERE” arrow, and places like ranger stations and the visitor center clearly marked with red dots.

O’Donnell got out of the jeep, shotgun in hand, and waved at Gutierrez. She took her shotgun and stepped out onto the road with him. Wil debated whether or not he should stay in the jeep, then realized there wasn’t much point if he didn’t have the keys. Gutierrez had tucked them into her pants pocket. He grabbed his axe and hopped out with the other two. Matsuda joined them, and Wil saw he had a small hatchet in a leather case strapped to his belt. He immediately approached the map on the edge of the picnic area and began to study it.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

“What’s up?” Gutierrez asked O’Donnell as they met between the two jeeps. Wil stood a short ways behind them, near the middle of the road where he had a clearer view of the woods around them. He didn’t want any crazy wildlife or black-eyed things emerging from behind a tree without warning.

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” O’Donnell said.

“What? Like I know what the hell is happening?”

“Rosa, that’s not what I meant. Just…we can’t keep driving with no plan. We’re gonna come up on the south-west exit soon,” O’Donnell said.

“I gotta get to Portland. My family is…my parents are old and my brother and sister are too young for whatever is going on,” Gutierrez said.

“Okay so we take the exit. I got a few friends I need to check in on.”

“That’ll take ages.”

“Well the main road is out. That’s where Sandoval——”

“I know. I got it. Believe me,” Gutierrez said.

“Are there any ranger-only roads?” Wil asked.

“Yeah, but they’re pretty much all just inside the park. Makes it easier for us to get around and check on things, but none of them lead out to the highways or anything,” O’Donnell said.

“Not entirely true,” Matsuda replied and tapped the map. “Look here.”

He was pointing at a thin green line, just a few miles west of the visitor’s center. It curved away from the thicker gray line of the main road and slithered up north, roughly parallel to the road that lead north out of Oak Rest and directly towards the highway to Portland.

“That’s a ranger trail. It is big enough for a jeep, and leads up to one of the radio towers, but it just curves back towards the park after a few miles,” Gutierrez said. “Shit, the radio tower. You said Sandoval sent Jacobs there, right?”

“Oh god, yeah,” O’Donnell said. “We have to go tell him. If he goes back to the main station, those things could still be there.”

“Also a good idea,” Matsuda said, “but I was thinking more about this.”

The old man tapped at another side of the map. It showed an aerial photograph of the park. It was mostly just the silver-blue of the lake and lush green of the woods, but here and there Wil spotted the industrial gray of the main road, a square of a house’s roof, and so on.

Matsuda was tracing his finger along the area where the ranger’s trail was, but then veering off it and continuing north-east. Wil stepped forward and squinted at the aerial photo of the park. At first it looked as dense and green as the rest of the forest, but then Wil noticed it wasn’t. It was a long, narrow strip of pale brown bald earth peeking through the trees that lead toward the main road.

“What is that?” Wil asked. “Another ranger trail?”

“No,” Gutierrez said as she and O’Donnell stepped forward. “Old logging trail. It’s been decades since logging was permitted. Oak Rest’s a fairly recent national park. There hasn’t been a lot of time, relatively speaking, for trees to grow there. Even if it wasn’t sometimes those loggers ruined the soil. Gas spills, litter, excessive traffic, that sort of thing. Made it hard for plants to take root and grow.”

“If it is an old logging trail, it’d have been made for trucks. Way wider than a jeep,” O’Donnell said. “Even if the forest has started to come back, we might still be able to drive through it. Not at top speed, but it’s a possibility.”

“And it’ll likely join up at or near a major road sooner or later, or at least take us out of the woods,” Gutierrez said. The corner of Wil’s mouth twitched upwards in a smirk. He knew Gutierrez meant it literally, but “out of the woods,” was not something Wil thought anybody would ever be for a while, metaphorically.

“Then Portland, get our people and find out what’s going on,” O’Donnell said.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Matsuda said. “Everything I heard on the news and online seems to indicate a certain level of…instability in all major cities.”

“Only more reason to get to my family,” Gutierrez said. Wil didn’t say anything, but he felt the same: the more dangerous Portland may have been, the more he needed to make sure Naomi was safe and out. If he got killed in the process, so be it. He’d been willing to die for nothing. Far better to do it for something, or someone.

“It would be safer to head for the coast,” Matsuda said.

“Why?” O’Donnell said.

“Normally in a case of populated areas experiencing upheaval, it’s better to be in a place like where we are now: secluded, very low human population, lots of natural resources. But there’s too many unknown factors out here. I think the wildlife may be hostile as well,” Matsuda replied.

“The wildlife?” O’Donnell asked and scoffed.

“He’s right,” Wil said and explained his encounter with the buck, which Gutierrez confirmed.

“Jesus. Just like Birkin and that family,” O’Donnell said.

“Hmm. I only saw a few squirrels. But they were all in a similar state: black eyes, muscular, extensive vascular development,” Matsuda said. “Saw a small swarm of them take down a stray dog. Left before they noticed me. It’s another reason to get out of here: lots of wildlife, some of it already potentially hostile under the best circumstances. Lots of places for things to jump out at us with all these trees, and no infrastructure outside of a few stations and cabins built for luxury instead of utility.

“The coast will give us an ocean at our backs, long sight lines, and other options for travel, like a boat, if the road is blocked or otherwise impassable. The ocean is also a source of food, and plenty of freshwater rivers empty into it if we need water.”

“So you just wanna be a beach bum?” O’Donnell asked.

“No. Getting to the coast is just the start. From there we go north, about forty-some odd miles to the Air National Guard Outpost near Sunset Beach. They’ll have fences, supplies, weapons, and hopefully information. There are other military outposts between here and there, but most of them are in Portland or harder to get to.”

Wil blinked at Matsuda.

“And you just happen to know the locations of all the military bases in Oregon?” Wil asked. Matsuda looked at him from behind his thick glasses and gave him a gentle smile.

“Old men like me need their hobbies or we go senile,” he said.

“Uh-huh,” Wil said.

My ass, he thought.

“I’m going to Portland. You do what you want,” Gutierrez said.

“Hey,” O’Donnell said and took her hand. “I’m not letting you go alone.”

The two rangers looked at each other in silence and Gutierrez smiled at him. She squeezed his hand and dropped it as she turned back to her jeep.

“We should hit one of the other ranger stations for any supplies they have before we go,” Gutierrez said. “Real quick, in and out.”

“Do all the stations have generators and wifi?” Wil asked.

“Yeah. Wouldn’t hurt to do a check and see if there’s any news,” she replied. “Let’s do it and then see if that logging trail is worth a damn, and get the hell out of here.”

Matsuda sighed and shook his head. “Better to stay together for the time being.”

With that, all of them got back in the jeeps and sped away to the nearest ranger station.